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The U-20 women, the only U.S. youth national team to have qualified for every World Cup at their age
group, also faces Jamaica (Sunday, Jan. 21, 6:30 pm, UDN) and Mexico (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 3 pm, UDN) in Group B, from which the top two finishers advance to the semifinals, whose winners along with the
victor of the third-place game earn berths to the 2018 U-20 Women’s World Cup in France (Aug. 5-24).

Group A consists of Trinidad & Tobago, Canada, Costa Rica and Haiti.

• Costa Rica, which reached the finals in 2010 and 2014, is the only Concacaf nation besides the USA (8), Canada (7) and Mexico (7) to have appeared in a U-20 Women's World
Cup.

So far, in addition to host France (the 2016 U-20 World Cup runner-up), England, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, China, Japan, defending champion North Korea and
New Zealand have booked their tickets to the ninth Women's U-20 World Cup.

• The U.S. U-20s have an exceptional record of graduating players to the full national team.
For example, fifteen members of the U.S. squad that won the 2015 Women’s World Cup had U-20 World Cup experience:

KLIMKOVA ON HER SQUAD: “We have a
really good balance on the roster. We have good decision-makers, creative players, technical and strong players, so we can choose a lineup to be successful against any particular opponent. We focused
a lot on team-building during this year’s camps and during the sessions and games, you can see that we have some good leaders. …

“This is one of the most competitive groups
we’ve had, competitive both for positions and in how much they want to win. There is not a big gap between our starters and our finishers. We want our starters to start strong and the players
coming off the bench to finish even stronger. It’s made for some great competition in camp.”